I can't wait to brew this recipe on Thursday this week. It will be my first all-grain recipe since February of this year. I haven't had the time to do a nice, involved all-grain brew since my son was born. Been doing extract brews and it's just not the same. :-)

I plan to follow the recipe, and the only changes I have made are to substitute 0.75 oz of chinook hops instead of the magnum, since I already had the chinook and I will be adding an extra pound of 2-row to make up for my consistently low efficiency. Blah! I got the Wyeast 1084 Irish ale yeast for this batch and will be making my first 2L starter for this batch. It will also be the first batch that I will keg. I recently got my kegging system together and have a mini-fridge kegerator just begging to be filled.

Wish me luck. I'll report back with how everything went and post a pic of the first pint I pull of this delicious brew. We need more pics on this thread.

Glad you are back in the AG game. Don't forget to adjust your bittering hops to achieve 30ibu rather than just using 0.75. The original recipe was for a 4.5 gallon concentrated boil. Love the 1084 choice. It makes great beer.

Yeah, I wanted to keep it around 28-30 IBU, and with .75oz of 10.9% AA chinook in a 5 gal (6.5gal boil) batch for 60min, BeerSmith is giving me 28.4 IBU. Weird that you were getting about the same IBU with the same amount of 13.4% AA magnums at 60min. I wonder if BeerSmith is a little off then. ?? Maybe I'll bump it up to a full 1oz just to be safe. I don't want it to be cloying.

Yeah, I wanted to keep it around 28-30 IBU, and with .75oz of 10.9% AA chinook in a 5 gal (6.5gal boil) batch for 60min, BeerSmith is giving me 28.4 IBU. Weird that you were getting about the same IBU with the same amount of 13.4% AA magnums at 60min. I wonder if BeerSmith is a little off then. ?? Maybe I'll bump it up to a full 1oz just to be safe. I don't want it to be cloying.

See above. I did a smaller boil originally = lower hop utilization = less IBU per oz.

So I brewed this recipe last Thursday and everything went great. I mashed a little higher than the recipe recommended (start: 155F, finish: 154F), so I would make sure to have a good mouth feel. Many of my beers have been lacking in that dept.

I made a 2L starter with the Wyeast 1084 (Irish ale) 2 days before brew day, and decanted off half the liquid and pitched the yeast when the wort had cooled to 69F. Luckily, I went and bought a length of tubing for a blow off tube just in case, because by the next morning the fermentation was going crazy and had backwashed quite a bit of trub and wort into the jar at the end of the blow off tube. So I would definitely recommend a blow off tube with this recipe. I should have put the fermentor in a water bath, because by the next morning the temp was up at about 71F. So I put the bucket in a container of water and put some ice packs in there. It has been steady at 162F for the last few days and still bubbling away.

My OG came out a little high at 1.062 and I didn't boil off as much as I had planned so my volume in the fermentor was about 5.5gal, not the 5gal I had anticipated. Oh well, just means more of this delicious brew in the end. My efficiency is usually around 65%, so I had planned for that, but ended up being around 72% per BeerSmith's calculations.

The wort was black as night and tasted great going into the fermentor. Maybe a little more bitter than I would have guessed, but still great. Can't wait for this one to finish, so I can keg it and have it available for family on Thanksgiving.

I tasted my first after bottling the batch on Thursday, 29 September. It was well-carbonated and went well with my rib eye steak, baked potato and fresh spinach with hot bacon dressing. It was a bit "young," but that will change with time. I WILL brew this recipe again!